white thangs of al

This one is a topic of immense interest to me.

If you’ve been in the state for any amount of time, you’re probably at least to a small extent aware of the so-called “White Thang”. Like the Jersey Devil or the Chupacabra, the name has come to represent a couple different creatures. Depending on who you ask about it, the appearance of the creature described can vary wildly.

Originally sighted sometime in the late 1800’s (1), the white thang was first described as looking somewhat like a lion. It was a white, cat like creature with a mane and a little tuft of hair at the end of it’s tail (2). Other and more recent sightings describe creatures that range from a solid white (so-called phantom) kangaroo (which, as far as I can recall was last seen off of Winchester Road near New Market, AL as it bounded down a hillside in 2004), a bigfoot like creature (3) (again, solid white) that’s occasionally seen roaming around Decatur, Cullman, and more rural areas further south, a white ape (like a chimpanzee), and starting around 2014 a pale, sickly looking humanoid.

It’s pretty obvious that the term “white thang” has come to mean, well, any weird-looking white thing that somebody sees out in the woods. It can be somewhat hard for somebody trying to determine the reality behind any of these creatures when everybody you ask has a different version of white thang that interests them most.

This particular write-up is about the most recent incarnation of the creature. During that time period, I was mostly just collecting local stories and encounters, hoping some day to actually start doing something with them. I’d seen a mention of this new white thang in a story run around halloween that year, talking about local cryptids, creatures, and ghosts and was surprised that I hadn’t heard anything about it up to that point. After some digging around, I discovered a facebook page dedicated to people who’d encountered the creature and those attempting to locate it. At the time, there were only a handful of posts (mostly people saying, “Yeah, I saw it too!”) but one stood out among the rest.

This post was a somewhat decently written story of an encounter the poster’s sister had had with the creature near the hairpin turn on Monte Sano (if you’ve been up there, you know what I mean). His sister was parked, one night, at the overlook there near the hairpin when, from the woods on the other side of the road, emerged a sickly, pale humanoid. It seemed vaguely skeletal, was so white it was obviously unnatural, had no apparent nose, a slit for a mouth, and seemed to have rags draped over its body. Thinking initially that it was a very injured homeless man, she waited, briefly considering getting out of the car (or at least calling 911) as to help it. It started shambling, almost, towards her vehicle and, as it did, the creature’s appearance came fully into view and she drove off in terror.

The creature would be seen again for a number of months, most notably in and around Three Caves, in the creek off of Clinton, and at one point, perched in a tree on the side of the road near the Star Market in Five Points.

I was, honestly, enthralled by this. Here was a new creature being seen unlike anything I’d ever heard of. It seemed, at the time, like this was my John Keel moment (if you’ve ever read The Mothman Prophecies).

Upon further investigation, however, I was very quickly disheartened.

The original poster came back, this time with an interview that he’d supposedly conducted with his sister. It was about this time, while reading that interview, that I started to figure it out. Every story that the poster shared had the same writing style. Every person he spoke with used the same voice and the same terminology. Sure, you could say that maybe he was rewriting or paraphrasing as to give it a better spin, but it still didn’t sit right with me. You have to remember that, about this time, it was very popular to say you’d seen the rake or slenderman. Both of these creatures were created as creepy pastas — short pieces of horror fiction, presented most often as true stories of encounters. It was a cultural phenomenon. You couldn’t go anywhere without coming across someone who swore they’d actually encountered something like that.

And here, as this poster shared his story and it entered local consciousness, was his classification of this creature as the “true” white thang. This, it was said, was what people had been seeing. Not a white lion. Not a phantom kangaroo. Not a bigfoot. All of them were mistaken and this was the real one. It became very apparent to me, as a researcher, especially when I reached out to the guy and he had nothing to add (simply copy and pasting his interview and claiming that’s all there was to it) that the story simply wasn’t true. He was trying to add to the creepypasta. He was trying to make a local monster, so to speak, and it was very easy to do given how widespread and varied descriptions of these white thangs of Alabama were.

When it became apparent that I was very interested in the story and finding the truth behind it, he left the facebook page (which, if I haven’t said up to now, he was the person who made it) and offered to make me the admin and let me “continue his research”. At the time I wasn’t interested. If it had happened now, given my current beliefs concerning the paranormal, I’d have probably said yes.

That seems like the end of the story, doesn’t it?

Strangely, it isn’t. So, yeah, the guy probably made up the encounter. He probably just wanted to have this story go viral, right? Well, people, to this day, still claim to see the creature (or something like it)! This new white thang isn’t going away anytime soon. Locals see it on Monte Sano, on Green Mountain, even as far out as Chicken Foot (where other local paranormal enthusiasts have started to say it’s actual a bigfoot that can shapeshift into that form; weird, right?)!

I think belief and state of mind play a lot more into the paranormal than we realize. That, maybe if enough people believe in something then it might as well be real, you know? Here we have a very popular archetype of creature (at least at the time), give it a name that’s already really well known to locals, and bam! you’ve got an egregore, buddy!

I’m still out there following this story as, since sightings continue and can be really strange from time to time, I really think it’s worth the effort. If anything develops in the future, you’ll see it here first. And make sure to shoot me a message on the contact form if you’ve seen it, too!

Stay weird!

-Scott

FOOTNOTES

(1) Not very long after the founding of the state, actually — some people will tell you it can only be reliably traced back to the 1930’s or 40’s but in my initial investigation into this particular series of incidents I found a particularly old book at the Huntsville Public library that traces its origins back to around that time period. I know it mentioned an exact year, I just can’t recall it at the moment nor can I find where I took note of it in my research files. The witness in that case described a creature of the first type (described just after the asterisk leading to this footnote) lounging under a tree before bounding off.

(2) I knew someone who had an encounter with this particular creature and I was actually with them as it happened. I wanted to include the story in the main section above but, no matter where I tried to squeeze it in, it seemed out of place. I was at their house for dinner that night (this would have been in 2013) and it’d rained most of the day up to this point. I was in the kitchen helping with cooking when my friend, who was at this point sitting on the couch with the back door open, jumped up shouting he’d just seen something bound across his yard. I’d actually heard the thing hit the fence seconds before he reacted. It had apparently, and very briefly, jumped on to the top of his fence and perched there for a moment. In two bounds it crossed the yard and jumped over the fence on the other side. He said it was big, somewhat feline in shape, white, and a little bushy bit at the end of it’s tail. Where it landed on the fence, white hair remained (which he kept — I’ve asked it for it recently but he’s lost it over the years). In the alley on the other side of the yard, large sliding foot prints were visible in the mud.

(3) This one’s more often referred to as the “White Booger”. Always been fond of that name.